Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

—

Michael was thinking of former journalists like The New Republic ’s Stephen Glass. Glass was the author of a celebrated 1998 story, “Hack Heaven,” about a fifteen-year-old schoolboy hacker who was offered a job with a software company he’d hacked into. Glass wrote about being a fly-on-the-wall in the company’s offices — Jukt Micronics — as the boy negotiated his terms:

“I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Men comic number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy —and throw in Penthouse . Show me the money! Show me the money!” Across the table, executives… are listening and trying ever so delicately to oblige. “Excuse me, sir,” one of the suits says tentatively to the pimply teenager. “Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you.”

— STEPHEN GLASS, “WASHINGTON SCENE: HACK HEAVEN,” The New Republic , MAY 18, 1998

But there was no conference room, no Jukt Micronics, no schoolboy hacker. A Forbes digital journalist, Adam Penenberg, annoyed that The New Republic had scooped him on his own turf, did some digging and discovered that Glass had invented it all. Glass was fired. He later enrolled in law school, earned a degree magna cum laude, applied in 2014 to practice law in California, and was refused. Glass’s shaming was following him around wherever he went, like Pigpen’s cloud of dirt. In some ways, he and Jonah Lehrer were eerily alike — young, nerdy, Jewish, preternaturally successful journalists on a roll who made things up. But Glass had invented entire scenarios, casts of characters, reams of dialogue. Jonah’s “I’m glad I’m not that ” at the end of “I’m glad I’m not me” was stupid and wrong, but a world that doled out punishments as merciless as that would be unfathomable to me. I thought Michael was being overly dramatic to believe that pressing send would sentence Jonah to Stephen Glass — level oblivion.

—

In the end, it was all academic for Michael. He said he felt as trapped in this story as Jonah was. It was like they were both in a car with failed brakes, hurtling helplessly toward this ending together. How could Michael not press send? What would people think if the story got out? That he’d covered it up for career advancement? “I would have been the spineless so-called journalist who buckled to Andrew Wylie. I never would have worked again.”

Plus, Michael said, something had happened a few hours earlier that he felt made it impossible for him to bury the story. After Jonah had confessed over the phone to him, Michael was shaking, so he went to a café in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to calm down. It was the Café Regular du Nord. As he sat outside, he ran into a fellow writer, Vanity Fair ’s Dana Vachon.

“I’m doing this story and this guy just fucking confessed to me that it’s all phony ,” Michael told him.

“Who?” Dana Vachon replied.

“I can’t tell you,” Michael said.

That second Michael’s phone rang. The screen flashed up the words JONAH LEHRER.

“Oh,” Dana Vachon said. “Jonah Lehrer.”

“Fuck you!” Michael said. “You can’t say anything!”

So now Dana Vachon knew. Michael’s editors at Tablet knew. Andrew Wylie knew. It was not going to stay contained.

So Michael pressed send.

—

Michael had one final telephone conversation with Jonah after they both knew it was over. It was just a few hours before the story appeared. Michael had barely slept that night. He was exhausted. He said to Jonah, “I just want you to know that it makes me feel like shit to do this.”

“And Jonah paused,” Michael told me. “And then he said to me, no joke, he said, ‘You know, I really don’t care how you feel.’” Michael shook his head. “It was icy.”

Then Jonah said to Michael, “I really, really regret…”

Regret what? Michael thought. Cheating? Lying?

“I really regret ever responding to your e-mail,” Jonah said.

“And my response to him,” Michael said, “was basically silence.”

—

That night Michael was “shattered. I felt horrible. I’m not a fucking monster. I was crushed and depressed. My wife can confirm this.” He replayed in his mind his telephone conversations with Jonah. Suddenly, he felt suspicious. Maybe the icy Jonah from that final conversation had been the real Jonah all along. Maybe Jonah had been playing Michael all that time, “cranking the emotions” to guilt-trip him. Maybe Jonah had assessed Michael as “pliable and easy to manipulate.” When Michael had told Jonah that he’d spoken to Jeff Rosen, Jonah’s reply had been “Then I guess you’re a better journalist than me.” That suddenly sounded incredibly condescending to Michael, like he saw Michael as just “some putz piddling around trying to pick up freelance work.” Maybe everything Jonah had done during the previous weeks was, in fact, devious and very well plotted.

I wondered: Had Jonah really been devious, or just terrified? Was Michael conjuring up words like devious in an attempt to feel less bad? Devious is creepy. Terrified is human.

—

“Having a phone conversation with somebody is like reading a novel,” Michael said. “Your mind creates a scenario. I sort of knew what he looked like from his author jacket photos, but I’d never seen him move. I didn’t know his gait. I didn’t know his clothes. Well, I knew he posed in his hipster glasses. But over those four weeks, I was imagining this character. I was picturing his house. A little house. He’s a journalist. I’m a journalist. I’m a fucking schlub. I pay my rent. I’m fine, I’m happy, but I’m not doing great.”

This was about the third time Michael had described himself to me as a “schlub” or something similar. I suppose he knew that highlighting this aspect of himself made for the most dramatic, likable retelling of the collision between the two men. The nobody blogger and the crooked VIP. David and Goliath. But I wondered if he was doing it for more than just storytelling reasons. All the stuff he said about how it wasn’t his fault that he stumbled onto the story, how he made no money from it, how the stress nearly killed him, how he was actually trapped into it by Andrew Wylie and Dana Vachon… it suddenly hit me: Michael was traumatized by what he had done. When he’d said to me, “Don’t ever do it”—don’t ever press send on a story that would destroy someone — it wasn’t a figure of speech. He meant it.

“I was picturing his house, a little house,” Michael continued. “I was transferring my life onto his. His wife’s bustling around, his kid’s in the background, he’s in one of the two bedrooms at the back, sweating.” Michael paused. “And then my friend from the Los Angeles Times sent me a story from 2009 about the purchase of the Julius Shulman house.”

The Hollywood Hills residence and studio of the late iconic photographer Julius Shulman has sold for $2.25 million. The Midcentury Modern steel-frame house, built in 1950 and designed by Raphael S. Soriano, is a Los Angeles historic landmark. The buyer is bestselling author and lecturer Jonah Lehrer. His book “How We Decide” has been translated into a dozen languages. The writer has an affinity for classic design.

— LAUREN BEALE, Los Angeles Times , DECEMBER 4, 2010

The Shulman House. Photograph by Michael K. Wilkinson, reproduced with his permission.

“It’s unfair,” Michael said. “It’s stupid of me. In some ways it’s unconscionable to begrudge him his success. But it made things a bit different.”